The Tao of Anarchy: There is no God. There is no State. They are all superstitions that are established by the power-hunger psychopaths to divide, rule, and enslave us. It's only you and me, we are all true and real existence though in one short life. That is, We all are capable to freely interact with one another without coercion from anyone. We all are capable to take self-responsibility to find ways to live with one another in liberty, equality, harmony, and happiness before leaving this world forever. We all were born free and equal among all beings on this planet. We are not imprisoned in and by a place with a political name just because we were born there by chance. We are not chained to a set of indoctrinated beliefs that have been imposed upon us by so-called traditions. This Planet is home to all of us. No one owns it. We share the benefits from and responsibility to this Earth. We pledge no oath, no allegiance to no one; submit to no authority. We are all free and equal. The only obligation we all must undertake constantly with consistency is to respect the same freedoms and rights of others.

The head researcher of the study, “Johannes Bohannon,” took to io9
in May of that year to reveal that his name was actually John Bohannon,
the “Institute of Diet and Health” was in fact nothing more than a
website, and the study showing the magical weight loss effects of
chocolate consumption was bogus. The hoax was the brainchild of a German
television reporter who wanted to “demonstrate just how easy it is to
turn bad science into the big headlines behind diet fads.”

Given how widely the study’s surprising conclusion was publicized—from the pages of Bild, Europe’s largest daily newspaper to the TV sets of viewers in Texas and Australia—that
demonstration was remarkably successful. But although it’s tempting to
write this story off as a demonstration about gullible journalists and
the scientific illiteracy of the press, the hoax serves as a window into
a much larger, much more troubling story.

What makes the chocolate weight loss study so revealing isn’t that it was completely fake; it’s that in an important sense it wasn’t fake. Bohannes really did conduct a weight loss study and the data really does
support the conclusion that subjects who ate chocolate on a low-carb
diet lose weight faster than those on a non-chocolate diet. In fact, the
chocolate dieters even had better cholesterol readings. The trick was
all in how the data was interpreted and reported.

As Bohannes explained in his post-hoax confession:

“Here’s a dirty little science secret: If you measure a
large number of things about a small number of people, you are almost
guaranteed to get a ‘statistically significant’ result. Our study
included 18 different measurements—weight, cholesterol, sodium, blood
protein levels, sleep quality, well-being, etc.—from 15 people. (One
subject was dropped.) That study design is a recipe for false
positives.”

You see, finding a “statistically significant result” sounds
impressive and helps scientists to get their paper published in
high-impact journals, but “statistical significance” is in fact easy to
fake. If, like Bohannes, you use a small sample size and measure for 18
different variables, it’s almost impossible not to find some
“statistically significant” result. Scientists know this, and the
process of sifting through data to find “statistically significant” (but
ultimately meaningless) results is so common that it has its own name: “p-hacking” or “data dredging.”

But p-hacking only scrapes the surface of the problem. From
confounding factors to normalcy bias to publication pressures to
outright fraud, the once-pristine image of science and scientists as an
impartial font of knowledge about the world has been seriously
undermined over the past decade.

Although these types of problems are by no means new, they came into vogue when John Ioannidis,
a physician, researcher and writer at the Stanford Prevention Research
Center, rocked the scientific community with his landmark paper “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.”
The 2005 paper addresses head on the concern that “most current
published research findings are false,” asserting that “for many current
scientific fields, claimed research findings may often be simply
accurate measures of the prevailing bias.” The paper has achieved iconic
status, becoming the most downloaded paper in the Public Library of
Science and launching a conversation about false results, fake data,
bias, manipulation and fraud in science that continues to this day.

JOHN IOANNIDIS: This is a paper that is
practically presenting a mathematical modeling of what are the chances
that a research finding that is published in the literature would be
true. And it uses different parameters, different aspects, in terms of:
What we know before; how likely it is for something to be true in a
field; how much bias are maybe in the field; what kind of results we
get; and what are the statistics that are presented for the specific
result.

I have been humbled that this work has drawn so much attention and
people from very different scientific fields—ranging not just
bio-medicine, but also psychological science, social science, even
astrophysics and the other more remote disciplines—have been attracted
to what that paper was trying to do.

So what is the problem? And how bad is it, really? And what does it
mean for an increasingly tech-dependent society that something is rotten
in the state of science?

To get a handle on the scope of this dilemma, we have to realize that
the “crisis” of science isn’t a crisis at all, but a series of
interrelated crises that get to the heart of the way institutional
science is practiced today.

First, there is the Replication Crisis.

This is the canary in the coalmine of the scientific crisis in
general because it tells us that a surprising percentage of scientific
studies, even ones published in top-tier academic journals that are
often thought of as the gold standard for experimental research, cannot
be reliably reproduced. This is a symptom of a larger crisis because
reproducibility is considered to be a bedrock of the scientific process.

In a nutshell, an experiment is reproducible if independent
researchers can run the same experiment and get the same results at a
later date. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why this is
important. If an experiment is truly revealing some fundamental truth
about the world then that experiment should yield the same results under
the same conditions anywhere and at any time (all other things being
equal).

Well, not all things are equal.

In the opening years of this decade, the Center for Open Science led a
team of 240 volunteer researchers in a quest to reproduce the results
of 100 psychological experiments. These experiments had all been
published in three of the most prestigious psychology journals. The
results of this attempt to replicate these experiments, published in
2015 in a paper on “Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science,” were abysmal. Only 39 of the experimental results could be reproduced.

Worse yet for those who would defend institutional science from its
critics, these results are not confined to the realm of psychology. In
2011, Nature published a paper showing that researchers were only able to reproduce between 20 and 25 per cent of 67 published preclinical drug studies. They published another paper
the next year with an even worse result: researchers could only
reproduce six of a total of 53 “landmark” cancer studies. That’s a
reproducibility rate of 11%.

These studies alone are persuasive, but the cherry on top came in May 2016 when Naturepublished the results of a survey
of over 1,500 scientists finding fully 70% of them had tried and failed
to reproduce published experimental results at some point. The poll
covered researchers from a range of disciplines, from physicists and
chemists to earth and environmental scientists to medical researchers
and assorted others.

So why is there such a widespread inability to reproduce experimental
results? There are a number of reasons, each of which give us another
window into the greater crisis of science.

The simplest answer is the one that most fundamentally shakes the
widespread belief that scientists are disinterested truthseekers who
would never dream of publishing a false result or deliberately mislead
others.

More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce
another scientist’s experiments, and more than half have failed to
reproduce their own experiments. Those are some of the telling figures
that emerged from Nature’s survey of 1,576 researchers who took a brief
online questionnaire on reproducibility in research.

The data reveal sometimes-contradictory attitudes towards
reproducibility. Although 52% of those surveyed agree that there is a
significant ‘crisis’ of reproducibility, less than 31% think that
failure to reproduce published results means that the result is probably
wrong, and most say that they still trust the published literature.

Data on how much of the scientific literature is reproducible are
rare and generally bleak. The best-known analyses, from psychology1 and
cancer biology2, found rates of around 40% and 10%, respectively.

In fact, the data shows that the Crisis of Fraud in scientific circles is even worse than scientists will admit. A study
published in 2012 found that fraud or suspected fraud was responsible
for 43% of scientific paper retractions, by far the single leading cause
of retraction. The study demonstrated a 1000% increase in (reported) scientific fraud
since 1975. Together with “duplicate publication” and “plagiarism,”
misconduct of one form or another accounted for two-thirds of all
retractions.

So much for scientists as disinterested truth-tellers.

Indeed, instances of scientific fraud are cropping up more and more in the headlines these days.

Last year, Kohei Yamamizu of the Center for iPS Cell Research and Application was found to have completely fabricated the data for his 2017 paper in the journal Stem Cell Reports, and earlier this year it was found that Yamamizu’s data fabrication was more extensive than previously thought, with a paper from 2012 also being retracted due to doubtful data.

Another Japanese researcher, Haruko Obokata, was found to have
manipulated images to get her landmark study on stem cell creation
published in Nature. The study was retracted and one of Obokata’s co-authors committed suicide when the fraud was discovered.

There are a number of reasons why fraud and misconduct is on the
rise, and these relate to more structural problems that unveil yet more
crises in science.

Like the Crisis of Publication.

We’ve all heard of “publish or perish” by now. It means that only
researchers who have a steady flow of published papers to their name are
considered for the plush positions in modern-day academia.

This pressure isn’t some abstract or unstated force; it is direct and
explicit. Until recently the medical department at London’s Imperial
College told researchers
that their target was to “publish three papers per annum including one
in a prestigious journal with an impact factor of at least five.”
Similar guidelines and quotas are enacted in departments throughout
academia.

And so, like any quota-based system, people will find a way to cheat
their way to the goal. Some attach their names to work they have little
to do with. Others publish in pay-to-play journals that will publish anything
for a small fee. And others simply fudge their data until they get a
result that will grab headlines and earn a spot in a high-profile
journal.

It’s easy to see how fraudulent or irreproducible data results from
this pressure. The pressure to publish in turn puts pressure on
researchers to produce data that will be “new” and “unexpected.” A study
finding that drinking 5 cups of coffee a day increases your chance of urinary tract cancer (or decreases your chance of stroke)
is infinitely more interesting (and thus publishable) than a study
finding mixed results, or no discernible effect. So studies finding a
surprising result (or ones that can be manipulated
into showing surprising results) will be published and those with
negative results will not. This makes it much harder for future
scientists to get an accurate assessment of the state of research in any
given field, since untold numbers of experiments with negative results
never get published, and thus never see the light of day.

But the pressure to publish in high-impact, peer-reviewed journals itself raises the specter of another crisis: The Crisis of Peer Review.

The peer review process is designed as a check against fraud, sloppy
research and other problems that arise when journal editors are
determining whether to publish a paper. In theory, the editor of the
journal passes the paper to another researcher in the same field who can
then check that the research is factual, relevant, novel and sufficient
for publication.

In practice, the process is never quite so straightforward.

The peer review system is in fact rife with abuse, but few cases are as flagrant as that of Hyung-In Moon.
Moon was a medicinal-plant researcher at Dongguk University in
Gyeongju, South Korea, who aroused suspicions by the ease with which his
papers were reviewed. Most researchers are too busy to review other
papers at all, but the editor of The Journal of Enzyme Inhibition and Medicinal Chemistry
noticed that the reviewers for Moon’s papers were not only always
available, but that they usually submitted their review notes within 24
hours. When confronted by the editor about this suspiciously quick work,
Moon admitted that he had written most of the reviews himself. He had
simply gamed the system, where most journals ask researchers to submit
names of potential reviewers for their papers, by creating fake names
and email addresses and then submitting “reviews” of his own work.

Beyond the incentivization of fraud and opportunities for gaming the
system, however, the peer review process has other, more structural
problems. In certain specialized fields there are only a handful of
scientists qualified to review new research in the discipline, meaning
that this clique effectively forms a team of gatekeepers over an entire
branch of science. They often know each other personally, meaning any
new research they conduct is certain to be reviewed by one of their
close associates (or their direct rivals).
This “pal review” system also helps to solidify dogma in echo chambers
where the same few people who go to the same conferences and pursue
research along the same lines can prevent outsiders with novel
approaches from entering the field of study.

In the most egregious cases, as with researchers in the orbit of the
Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, groups of
scientists have been caught conspiring to oust an editor from a journal that published papers that challenged their own research and even conspiring to “redefine what the peer-review literature is” in order to stop rival researchers from being published at all.

So, in short: Yes, there is a Replication Crisis in science. And yes, it is caused by a Crisis of Fraud. And yes, the fraud is motivated by a Crisis of Publication. And yes, those crises are further compounded by a Crisis of Peer Review.

But what creates this environment in the first place? What is the
driving factor that keeps this whole system going in the face of all
these crises? The answer isn’t difficult to understand. It’s the same
thing that puts pressure on every other aspect of the economy: funding.

Modern laboratories investigating cutting edge questions involve
expensive technology and large teams of researchers. The types of labs
producing truly breakthrough results in today’s environment are the ones
that are well funded. And there are only two ways for scientists to get
big grants in our current system: big business or big government. So it
should be no surprise that “scientific” results, so suspectible to the
biases, frauds and manipulations that constitute the crises of science,
are up for sale by scientists who are willing to provide dodgy data for
dirty dollars to large corporations and politically-motivated government
agencies.

RFK JR.: “Simpsonwood” was the
transcripts of a secret meeting that was held between CDC and 75
representatives of the vaccine industry in which they reviewed a report
that CDC had ordered—the Verstraeten study—of a hundred thousand
children in the United States vaccine safety database. And when they
looked at it themselves, they said, quote: “It is impossible to massage
this data to make the signal go away. There is no denying that there is a
connection between autism and thimerosal in the vaccines.” And this is
what they said. I didn’t say this. This is what their own scientists

[said]

and their own conclusion of the best doctors, the top people at
CDC, the top people at the pharmaceutical injury industry.

And you know, when they had this meeting they had it not in
Atlanta—which was the headquarters of the CDC—but in Simpsonwood at a
private conference center, because they believed that that would make
them able to insulate themselves from a court request under the Freedom
of Information Law and they would not have to disclose the transcripts
of these meetings to the public. Somebody transcribed the meetings and
we were able to get a hold of it. You have them talking about the
Verstraeten study and saying there’s a clear link, not just with autism
but with the whole range of neurological disorders—speech delay,
language delay, all kinds of learning disorders, ADD, hyperactivity
disorder—and the injection of these vaccines.

[. . .]and at the end of that meeting they make a few decisions. One
is Verstraeten, the man who designed who conducted the study, is hired
the next day by GlaxoSmithKline and shipped off to switzerland, and six
months later he sends in a redesigned study that includes cohorts who
are too young to have been diagnosed as autistic. So he loads the study
down, the data down, and they tell the public that they’ve lost all the
original data. This is what CDC says till this day: That it does not
know what happened to the original data in the Verstraeten study. And
they published this other study that is a corrupt and crooked—what we
call tobacco science done by a bunch of bio-stitutes, crooked scientists
who are trying to fool the American public.

Then Kathleen Stratton from CDC and IOM says “What we need is we need some studies that will disprove the
link.” So they work with the vaccine industry to gin up these four phony
European studies that are done by vaccine industry employees, funded by
the vaccine industry and published in the American Academy of
Pediatrics magazine, which receives 80% of its revenue from the vaccine
industry. And none of these scientists disclose any of their myriad
conflicts which conventional ethics rules require them to do. It’s not
disclosed.

TOM CLARKE: 64,000 people dead. Tens of thousands hospitalized. A country crippled by a virus.

The predictions of the impact of swine flu on Britain were grim. The
government’s response: Spending hundreds of millions of pounds on
antiviral drugs and vaccines adverts and leaflets. But ten months into
the pandemic, only 355 Britons have died and globally the virus hasn’t
lived up to our fears.

Were government’s misled into preparing for the worst? Politicians in
Brussels are now asking for an investigation into the role
pharmaceutical companies played in influencing political decisions that
led to a swine flu spending spree.

WOLFGANG WODARG: There must be a process to to get
more transparency [about] how the decisions in the WHO function and who
is influencing the decisions of the WHO and what is the role of
pharmaceutical industry there. I’m very suspicious about the processes
which are behind this pandemic.

TOM CLARKE: The Council of Europe Committee want the
investigation to focus on the World Health Organization’s decision to
lower the threshold required for a pandemic to be formally declared.

MARGARET CHAN: The world is now at the start of the 2009 influenza pandemic.

REPORTER: When this happened in June last year,
government’s had to activate huge, pre-prepared contracts for drugs and
vaccines with manufacturers. They also want to probe ties between key
WHO advisors and drug companies.

PAUL FLYNN: Who is deciding what the risk is? Is it
the pharmaceutical companies who want to sell drugs, or is it someone
making a decision based on the perceived danger? In this case it appears
that the danger was vastly exaggerated. And was it exaggerated by the
pharmaceutical companies in order to make money?

JAMES CORBETT: And a perfect example of
that came out just in the past month where it was discovered,
revealed—”Oh my God! Who would have thought it?”—people who consume
artificial sweeteners like aspartame are three times more likely to suffer from a common form of stroke than others. Who would have thought it (except everyone who’s been worming warning about aspartame for decades and decades)?

And if you want to know more about aspartame and how it got approved
in the first place you can go back and listen to my earlier podcast on “Meet Donald Rumsfeld”
where we talked about his role in getting aspartame approved for human
consumption in the first place. But yes, now decades later they come out
with a study that shows “Well guys, we had no idea, but guess what? It
does apparently cause strokes!”

And this is particularly galling, I suppose, because if you go back
even a couple of years ago the paper of record, the “Old Gray Lady,” the
New York Times (and every other publication, to be fair) that ever tried to address this would always talk about sweeteners as being better than sugar for you. And they would point to a handful of studies. The same studies every time, including—I mean, just as one example this 2007 study
which was a peer review study [that went] through various different
studies that had been published, and this was done by a “panel of
experts” as it was said at the time. And it was cited in all of these
different reports by the New York Times and others as showing
that aspartame was even safer than sugar and blah blah blah. And when
you actually looked at the study itself you found that—lo and
behold!—the “panel of experts” was put together by something called “the
burdock group” which was a consulting firm that worked for the food
industry amongst others and was in that particular instance hired by ajinomoto, who people might know as a producer of aspartame.

So, yes, you have the aspartame manufacturers hiring consultants to
put together panels of scientific scientific experts that then come out
with the conclusion that, “Yes! Aspartame is sweet as honey and good for
you like breathing oxygen. It’s just so wonderful! Oh, it’s like manna
from heaven!” And lo and behold they were lying. Who would have thought
it? Who would have imagined that the scientific process could be so
thoroughly corrupted?

Sadly, there is no lack of examples of how commercial interests have skewed research in a range of disciplines.

In some cases, inconvenient data is simply hidden from the public. This was what happened with “Project 259,”
a feeding experiment in which lab rats were separated into two groups:
One was given a high-sugar diet and the other was given a so-called
“basic PRM diet” of cereal meals, soybean meals, whitefish meal, and
dried yeast. The results were astounding. Not only did the study provide
the first experimental evidence that sugar and starch are actually
metabolized differently, but it also found that “sucrose [. . .] may
have a role in the pathogenesis of bladder cancer.” But Project 259 was
being funded by something called the “Sugar Research Foundation,” which
has organizational ties to the trade association of the US sugar
industry. As a result, the study was shelved, the results were kept from
the public and it took 51 years for the experiment to be dug up by researchers and published. But this was too late for the generation of victims that The Sugar Conspiracy created, raised on a low-fat, high sugar diet that is now known to be toxic.

In other cases, industry secretly sponsors and even covertly promotes
questionable research that bolsters claims to their product’s safety.
This is the case of Johnson & Johnson, which was facing a potential
scandal over revelations that its baby powder contained asbestos. They hired an Italian physician to conduct a study on the health of talc miners in the Italian Alps, and even told him what the study should find:
data that “would show that the incidence of cancer in these subjects is
no different from that of the Italian population or the rural control
group.” When the physician came back with the data as instructed,
J&J were unhappy with the form and style of the study’s write up, so
they handed it to a scientific ghostwriter to prepare it for publication. The ghostwritten paper was then published in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine,
and the research was cited by a review article in the British Journal
of Industrial Medicine later that year, which concluded that there is no
evidence suggesting that the “normal use” of cosmetic talc poses a
health hazard. That review article
was written by Gavin Hildick-Smith, the Johnson & Johnson physician
executive who had commissioned the Italian study, dictated its findings
and sent it out for ghostwriting. Dr. Hildick-Smith failed to disclose
this conflict in his review article, however.

The list of such egregious abuses of “scientific” institutions and
processes is seemingly endless, with more stories surfacing on a weekly
basis. Websites like Retraction Watch
attempt to document fraud and misconduct in science as it is revealed,
but stories about the corporate hand behind key research studies or
conspiracies to cover up inconvenient research are reported in a
haphazard fashion and generally receive little traction with the public.

But these are not new issues. There have been those warning us about
the dangerous confluence of money, government power and science since
the birth of the modern era.

DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: Today, the solitary inventor,
tinkering in his shop, has been overshadowed by task forces of
scientists in laboratories and testing fields. In the same fashion, the
free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and
scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of
research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government
contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. For
every old blackboard there are now hundreds of new electronic computers.

The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal
employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present –
and is gravely to be regarded.

Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we
should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that
public policy could itself become the captive of a
scientific-technological elite.

In his prescient warning, Eisenhower not only gave a name to the
“military-industrial complex” that has been working to steer American
foreign policy since the end of the second World War, but he also warned
how the government can shape the course of scientific research with its
funding. Is it any wonder, then, that military contractors like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman
are among the leading funders in cutting edge research in
nanotechnology, quantum computing, “human systems optimization” and
other important scientific endeavors? Or that the Pentagon’s own Defense
Advanced Research Projects Agency provides billions of dollars
per year to help find military applications for breakthroughs in
computer science, molecular biology, robotics and other high-cost
scientific research?

And what does this mean for researchers who are looking to innovate in areas that do not have military or commercial use?

Yes, there is not just one crisis of science, but multiple crises.
And, like many other crises, they find a common root in the pressures
that come from funding large-scale, capital-intensive, industrial
research.

But this is not simply a problem of money, and it will not be solved
by money. There are deeper social, political and structural roots of
this crisis that will need to be addressed before we understand how to
truly mitigate these problems and harness the transformative power of
scientific research to improve our lives. In the next edition of The
Corbett Report, we will examine and dissect the various proposals for
solving the crisis of science.

Solving this crisis—these crises—is important. The scientific method is
valuable. We should not throw out the baby of scientific knowledge with
the bathwater of scientific corruption. But we need to stop treating
science as a magic 8-ball that can solve all of our societal and
political problems. And we need to stop venerating scientists as a
quasi-priest class whose dictates are beyond question by the unwashed
masses.

After all, when an Ipsos MORI poll found that nine out of ten British people would trust scientists to “follow the rules,” even Nature‘s editorial board was compelled to ask: “How many scientists would say the same?”